Shamelessly enjoyable, this raucous Aussie movie keeps us laughing - and ultimately sniffling back the tears - as it recounts an urban myth. A terrific sense of the time and place, rambunctious characters and a terrific starring dog make it well worth seeing.

Red Dog is the most famous resident of Dampier, northwest Australia. Through the 1970s, he unified the mining community as a communal pet, then he adopted a master in John (Lucas). He eventually accepts John's girlfriend Nancy (Rachael Taylor) as part of the pack, which includes the local barman (Noah Taylor) and a lively collection of miners (Angel, Batchelor, Nichol and others). He also has a rivalry with the fiendish Red Cat. And after John disappears, he roams the length and breadth of western Australia looking for him.

In the game of life, Danny Morgan (Rhys Ifans) is a checkers piece sitting on a chess board. At his construction site job, he spends more time in the cement mixer than he does on the girders. His solution to just about any problem, no matter how complicated, is to hold a pancake breakfast. And his current dream in life is to tie multiple helium balloons to his deckchair to see if he can get off the ground.

Danny Deckchair is an unchallenging romantic comedy that begins with its quirky character's balloon-and-chair experiment but never flies as high as the film's leading man. Writer/director Jeff Balsmeyer injects his script with the universal desire to fit in, to be accepted despite one's obvious faults. It's familiar territory and relatively harmless, for sure, but it's also humorless and lacking in those all important grains of logical sense.